Though many of the concepts in this course are still relevant, overall this course does not reflect our current course standards.

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The "Calypso" Lesson is part of the full, JavaScript for WordPress course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Zac introduces Calypso, which is a re-envisioning of the WordPress application as a Single Page Application (SPA) built on React by the folks that make WordPress.

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Transcript from the "Calypso" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Zac Gordon: One of the biggest things that's come out lately is a product called Calypso. And so Calypso is built on React, it's completely a single page web app design and not only does it rebuild the entire admin area of WordPress in JavaScript in React, but it also has other abilities like checking stats.

[00:00:19] Letting you manage multiple blogs all in one place. Letting you track and read other people's blogs all from one admin area. And so Calypso was put out by the folks at Automatic. And this is where if you're not as familiar with WordPress, it's important to make a distinction.

[00:00:35] There's something called WordPress.org, which is the open source version of WordPress that we're working with today and that you could download and run in your site or run locally. And then you have WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of WordPress. Free to use but paid features, and this is run by a company automatic.

[00:00:52] So automatic has contributors that work full time on WordPress, but also on Calypso. So now there are people who's jobs are just to support the software. Now, you can not easily just take Calypso as this new admin interface and run it in a .org installation it's really set up for the .com environment.

[00:01:11] And it's doing some things like some node interactions that you cannot do on a traditional WordPress server because it's PHP based. But, this is a pretty big move because right after the API became available to do this stuff this was dropped and made quite a splash. I'm a pretty big fan of it, I try to use WordPress.com on some of my projects, just so I can stay exposed to these things.

[00:01:37] And one of the nice things about it is because it's JavaScript based, it's not hard to roll out a desktop version of it and mobile versions for Android and iPhone that are all native. But are also running on the same rough JavaScript base. So, the influence of Calypso should not be underestimated.

[00:01:55] Even though I'd say the majority of WordPress users and people unless your on .com, they don't use it. They're not contributing to it but because you have such a big company that has such a big influence on the future and direction. The fact that this big software that is used in production and is based on React has some influencing power on the JavaScript world today.